Two timing in personal relationships was probably expected by our Lord in Heaven which is why one of the Ten Commandments says “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife”. I can’t say with certainty whether our Creator of the Universe had expected mankind and society to evolve into the current world of corporations, business professionals and management experts. Had he called this one correctly way back when, we may have had a few commandments dedicated to loyalty and corporate monogamy.
This debate, about the rights and wrongs of company executives holding multiple jobs and the accompanying ethics, recently came into sharp focus when Wipro terminated some three hundred employees for two-timing. Over the years, I’ve been asked about this issue by prospective employees coming in for interviews. As I teach at a Business School, many of my students have sought my opinion on the rightness and wrongness of working in a side business while being on the full-time rolls of a corporation. Here are some of my thoughts.
Multi-tasking is a fashionable skill that busy executives love to flaunt without truly thinking about either its effectiveness as a time management strategy or the impact on others. The first part of my argument is based simply on the mathematics of division. If you keep the numerator constant and continue increasing the denominator, the resultant quotient will only come down. So, with multitasking. If time is the numerator, then talking to a supplier on one phone, text messaging your counterpart on the other side of the globe on another device and listening to a young executive present a business plan, all simultaneously, means only one thing. Your attention is divided and none of these things individually is being done particularly well. Net, you are underperforming in every task by running them all at the same time. Think about it.
My second issue is what I call the courtesy factor. How do we feel when someone pretends to listen to us as they conduct a WhatsApp chat? I don’t know about you, but I find it downright rude. I’ve often made presentations to company teams who were buried in their laptops and barely heard a word I said. What happened to giving the person in front of us our patient and undivided attention?
Which brings me to the big debate about two-timing.
During an interview I was conducting at a business school campus many years back, a young student confessed that he was running a small business with a classmate and expected that he would continue to do so even after starting his full-time job with us. This young man was taken aback when all of us on the interview panel unanimously voiced our disapproval. The follow up question then became “What if I were to do this after office hours?”
We resolved the dilemma by throwing down two questions to our candidate. One, would you hire someone in your own business knowing that he / she was already working on a side hustle? Two, if you received a call from your side-business during office hours working for us, would you take the call or not? That sealed the debate.
That my friends is the essence of this debate. I’m not going to get into conflict of interest, ethics, sensitive information leaking into the public domain and other incredibly complex, almost legal sounding issues. The reality is that you can only do so much in a 24-hour day. In most firms, even if employees work 24/7, the To Do list will remain uncomfortably long.
Companies hire you for your intellectual bandwidth and want your undivided attention. The best run global firms are increasingly offering employees outsourced help with mundane daily tasks like grocery shopping, laundry, picking up the kids from school, finding a plumber or an electrician, etc. All this not because they care about you at a human level (some actually do!!). It is simply because they want your intellectual bandwidth to be dedicated single-mindedly to the business for which you are paid your CTC. By freeing you from daily living chores they expect that your focused attention on the business will produce results that delight the shareholders and lead you and your firm to prosperity.
So, one thing at a time. One job at a time. One relationship at a time.
The results will follow.